Founding ML Researcher

About the Role Join an early-stage industrial AI startup as a founding member of its engineering team. You will build production multimodal AI for wearable devices, helping field professionals work through complex inspections and operational procedures with real-time visual assistance. What You'll Do Build and ship agentic vision-language model pipelines for wearable devices and industrial workflows. Develop evaluation tools, capture failure cases, and use field data to improve model quality with each release. Adapt model serving and edge inference for changing connectivity, latency, and hardware constraints. Create real-time voice and video interfaces, including conversational and proactive assistance modes. Fine-tune and optimize open-weight multimodal models for enterprise and on-premise deployments. What We're Looking For Typically 0 to 3 years of experience shipping production vision-language or multimodal AI systems, with Python and PyTorch. Hands-on experience owning production model and orchestration systems, including multi-step tool-using agents, evaluation design, and model improvement workflows. Applied computer vision experience beyond language-only AI, including visual reasoning and relevant detection or segmentation methods. Experience fine-tuning models with methods such as SFT or RLHF, and optimizing inference through quantization or serving tools such as vLLM, Triton, or TensorRT. Background in a startup, an early engineering team, or another fast-paced product environment; a strong technical degree or equivalent record of shipped AI work. Interest or experience in wearables, industrial AI, augmented reality, edge deployment, or autonomous systems is valuable. Compensation & Benefits Base salary: $180,000 to $230,000 annually. Visa sponsorship is available. Location On-site in San Francisco, California, United States.